My Midnight Sun-Balancing-Part 4

If Bella was more restless than usual last night, tonight she was as still as the dead.  I went rigid at the thought, every muscle reacting to the unintended metaphor.   I told myself not to be stupid and bent down, allowing my muscles to stay taught, reflexive, just in case.  

I was glad for her peace, her stilled soul.  Her lips parted slightly in untroubled slumber, moving almost imperceptibly as if she would speak had she not been so deeply unconscious.  They glowed silver in the faint light of the moon shining through her window.

For some reason even I was not fully aware, I took great pleasure seeing her like this; it stilled my own soul as well.  Like water rushing over the deep crevices of a desert floor, it seemed to saturate an old and desolate yearning, seemed to vindicate my own craving for rest. 

The next morning, only a brief moment after Charlie left for work, I pulled up in her driveway and cut the engine.  The air had a new energy to it, clean and fresh.  The smell of rain was present, as usual, but there was more.  My heightened olfactory senses picked up the touch of the sun warming things miles away, drifting in and blending with the odor of wet earth.  It was the smell of the sun, I knew, headed this way.  I had the windows rolled down to take it in, and I rested my elbow on its ledge.

Bella stumbled out of her house looking happy, radiant even, and joined me in the car.  What made her so beautiful?  It was far more than her attractive, well-placed features.  A beauty that came from the inside out, making those features glow.  I felt myself smiling without a conscious command to do so.  I couldn’t shake that odd feeling again.  The feeling that she fulfilled the purpose of my existence just by being.  

This set off another short-lived war between the two sides of my nature.  The human asked me how this could be any good for her, remembering Alice’s visions of the meadow.  Of Bella’s reaction...to something that would cause any normal human to run away screaming.  The monster inside me took great pleasure in the thought and wanted to smile too at the proximity, but the human just had to have its say.  It reasoned that the purpose of my existence in her life was still to protect her, to be her guardian.  And that I needed to be completely, thoroughly, careful.